'Second Life' users: Fix it, already
As the virtual world Second Life has grown and grown, with its total number of users heading into the several hundreds of thousands and concurrent users nearing 40,000, it has been going through some very visible growing pains.
Now many of the most visible members of the Second Life community, including land baroness Anshe Chung, as well as many others, are circulating an open letter to the virtual world's publisher, Linden Lab, spelling out their concerns and clamoring for positive action.
Among the problems identified are regular issues with grid stability--that is, that the virtual world's performance is suffering in many ways; inventory loss--that through successive new versions of the Second Life software people are losing items they've bought and can't get them back; build tool problems--that the basic design elements break too often; and more.
"In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users," the letter begins. "There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable."
According to the organizer of the letter campaign, Cristiano Diaz, who is known in Second Life as Cristiano Midnight, the letter will be run on many Web sites and blogs related to the virtual world, and that there are already several hundred signatories.
For anyone who has been around Second Life for a while, many of these problems are quite familiar, and Diaz and the signatories clearly hope that by bringing more public awareness to the ongoing issues, Linden Lab may take it upon itself to do more to address them.
"It is not an effort to embarrass or anger Linden Lab, who we do have a great amount of respect for," Diaz wrote, explaining the letter. "It is simply using the tools we have available to express ourselves collectively, since other outlets have been removed."
It will be very interesting to see how Linden Lab responds or reacts, if at all.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
thousand players? That's nothing. Tons of games and sites have
that much.
Why do you think anyone really cares? Clearly it's not the "new
trend", or there would have been other games like it coming out.
People just aren't interested.
Secondly, you should care because this is what the Web is evolving into. In ten or fifteen years, the 2D websites like what you're using now will be as antiquated as surfing with a text-only browser.
P2
Well if you think of life as a game then maybe perhapse you could call it a game...but I think not.
and the idiot who wrote this blog entry needs to recheck the figures...below are the lastest stats, this is why they keep talking about it..this is no small potatos
Total Residents: 5,957,036
Logged In Last 60 Days: 1,750,257
Online Now: 24,610
US$ Spent Last 24h: $1,525,633
LindeX Activity Last 24h: $223,921
SEE MORE economic statistics here!
The server crashes -- and all these tech-wannabe's DIE.
Maybe then CNET can devote the bandwidth to REAL stuff.
they basically put down Second Life for various reasons. If you really don't care to read these stories on sl, don't read them, don't respond to them, just ignore them. As long as you whine and post comments, you show you care, even if it is out of some weird twisted sense of hatred or misplaced anger.
As mentioned before, SL has more than a few 100k active users. Also, the community does rival that of Wow and games but keep in mind, SL is not a game so stop comparing it to games. People are making money in Second Life, not millions but for just one little game that has only been around for a few years, it's impressive. SL isn't about how much money can be made or how many people are part of it. It is about the potential and the possibility. I personally make a part time income off of it, I know a good number of people who make livings in sl some as much as 100k a year. Now that is not huge money to some but there is a thriving economy, small as it is. I'm kind of curious, out of all the people who complain about SL stories and how overhyped it is, how many ever actually bothered to check it out for themself?
(Let's see... were there any other criteria offered up to prove that SL is "not a game?" No? ok... that's it then.) Nice evening...
http://www.web-l.com/cuteanimals/cute-puppy-sitting.jpg
Maybe it heard that people are calling SL a game. Or maybe it's tired of C|Net shilling for SL. Maybe it just wants to be martyred... (72 virgins?)
- Software growing pains
- by bluemist9999 April 30, 2007 7:08 AM PDT
- It's pretty standard for any type of server software to have growing pains as it goes from a small amount of users to hundreds of thousands of users.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(39 Comments)So I don't see who Second Life would be any different.